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NY -12H NY residents please add sales tax Port Jefferson Station, NYl1776 VISA, MC, AMX, Checks & MOs accepted New York Residents Please Add Sales Tax THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 1992 the parallel between his own later career and Kane's.) The need for a serious Selznick biogra- phy (more serious, that is, than the one turned out in 1970 by Bob Thomas, who lacked access to some key people and documents) has been evident since the publication, a decade ago, of the madden- ingly evasive, not altogether reliable, but highly readable memoirs ofSelznick's first wife, Irene Mayer Selznick. And it is easy to see why their children, Jeffrey and Daniel Selznick, recruited the biographer they did. David Thomson, the author of "Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick" (Knopf; $35), is a British-born cinéaste who has demonstrated in several previous books the sort of encyclopedic familiarity and utter fascination with the minutIae of Hollywood that perhaps only foreigners are capable oE Among the nearly nine hundred engagingly opinion- ated profiles in his "Biographical Dictio- nary of Film"-an impressive reference work that, remarkably, he appears to have compiled largely by himself-is a vigor- ous tribute to Selznick as a man who "cared for every facet of making a film and had a greater sense of how to photograph individuals, how to use sets and music and how to construct a picture than many di- rectors." Selznick's memos, "laughed at by many, radiate an intuitive, loving preoc- cupation with detail," Thomson contin- ues. "He inaugurated epic, even if with a twopence coloured novelette." A reader of Thomson's seven-hun- dred-page book on Selznick will search in vaIn, however, for any trace of the affec- tion and energy of that earlier, page-and- a-half sketch. Thomson won't be caught recycling old Selznick legends, like the one about Vivien Leigh's casting in "Gone with the Wind"-that Selznick's agent-brother Myron escorted her onto the lot as Adanta was burning, and intro- duced her with the magic words "I want you to meet Scarlett O'Hara." And he re- jects as too simple the explanation of George Cukor's biographer, Patrick McGilligan, for the firing ofCukor as di- rector of "Gone with the Wind"-that Clark Gable said he would not "be di- rected by a fairy." Alas, in both the small and the large sense, Thomson has no story of his own to tell. He has taken one of the great rise-and-fall sagas of American movies and reduced it to an irritatingly disconnected series of quotes, excerpts from financial reports, tiny, half-told anec- dotes, and bizarre, extraneous reveries